Elevating Digital Dining with Lightspeed and me&u

If you’ve dined out in recent years, you may have noticed something that seems to have permeated a lot of venues. Something that was born out of necessity in the lockdowns that seems to have cemented itself into the hospitality landscape and looks to be here to stay.

I’m talking, of course, about digital ordering.

It has, of course, evolved from its early days where having a contact-free ordering experience was less of an added bonus, more of a legal necessity. Nowadays, digital ordering has become a sophisticated, viable means to not only add another ordering method for your business, but also streamline the process, speed up service and capture valuable customer data so that their future experiences can keep on improving.

A recent Statista survey revealed that around 45% of restaurants in Australia implement QR code ordering, with limited time offers and promotions being the next most popular way to stimulate consumer spending.

And one platform has emerged as a leading light in the digital ordering landscape: me&u.

Read on to learn how an integration with me&u can help your business.

• What is me&u?
• How does me&u work??
• Order & Pay
• Grow your brand with Connect CRM
• me&u integration with Lightspeed

What is me&u?

Put simply, me&u is a digital menu and ordering platform for your restaurant, bar or cafe which provides your customers with the ability to view menus, place orders and make payments directly from their phones.

Ordering times drop, spend-per-head gets a boost and the need for physical menus and traditional payment methods like cash is significantly reduced.

But how does me&u achieve this? Let’s find out.

How does me&u work?

me&u integrates directly into your Lightspeed platform and links with your menu to allow your customers to order what they want, when they want and how they want.

Your branded, digital ordering process is designed to guide customers through the ordering process, complete with photographs of your dishes, relevant upsells and cross-sells and a streamlined payment process for when they’re ready to settle up, saving businesses an average of 1 hour 36 minutes daily (according to Lightspeed’s 2024 Hospitality Report).

It also captures useful data on your customer’s dining habits, allowing you to provide an even better dining experience for their return visits.

Let’s have a look at some of the key features that make me&u work.

Order & Pay

Order & Pay is the bread and butter of me&u’s platform and it’s something that you’ll have encountered on many occasions at your local bar, restaurant or cafe. You scan a QR code to bring up the menu, order what you like and then pay. Guests can reorder individual drinks, dishes or even rounds at the touch of a button.

It’s quick and easy.

There is, however, a lot more than meets the eye to make me&u’s Order & Pay work so well.

Photography sells

When you create your menu within me&u, you have the option to upload photographs of your items and it’s an option definitely worth exploring.

me&u have found that menu items featuring images perform 6x better than menu items featuring text only.

Smart suggestions

AI is here and it’s not showing any signs of going anywhere, and that’s a good thing when used wisely. One such usage is me&u’s smart suggestions.

These AI driven recommendations guide your guests through the ordering process, suggesting relevant upsells and cross-sells automatically to boost spend-per-head.

Advanced batching

Dining out is better with friends, and it makes sense that each of your friends would be ordering and paying from their own phone. And whilst splitting an order is great for your guests, multiple dockets for the same table are exactly the opposite of what a kitchen needs.

Ordinarily, this would mean a staggered stream of multiple dockets for the same table dripping into the kitchen and making a mess of the back of house workflows. Not with me&u.

Advanced batching takes separate orders from the same table and automatically combines them into a single batch while still allowing your guests to order and pay individually.

Collect more data

Hospitality is a very competitive world and now more than ever, there is an emphasis on using customer experiences as a valuable tool in creating return business.

Each time a guest orders using Order & Pay, their preferences and previous orders are captured and saved for the next time they visit. With this valuable data at your fingertips, it provides me&u’s Connect with the tools to ensure your marketing campaigns have the best chance of being a hit with your customers.

Grow your brand with Connect CRM

In the modern hospitality landscape, it’s becoming more important than ever to find ways to bring guests back. Gone are the days when you can rely on merely good faith and good offerings, these days we need a little more.

Thankfully, me&u has Connect CRM to grow your business’ brand and keep your guests coming back for more, time after time.

Let’s go deeper into Connect CRM’s growth toolkit.

Intuitive email marketing

Marketing emails can be difficult for people to produce. There’s content and design work that goes into emails produced by the pros and they can be hard to compete with when you’re vying for your guest’s attention.

Connect gives you the ease of a drag-and-drop editor, complete with pre-designed templates and conditional content showing information relevant to the reader’s interests. Finish off by adding a POS-integrated voucher or two and your new email campaign is ready to go live. 

Effective SMS communications

The perfect companion to a good email campaign is corresponding SMS messages and with a 98% deliverability rate, SMS is ideal for bulk communication. 

It goes further than marketing campaigns too. 

Use Connect’s SMS communications to send staff messages, rosters, alerts—anything you deem worthy of sending via text.

Smart automation

Now that you’ve created your emails and SMS communications, it’s time to send them out into the world. This alone can be a time-consuming task (around 1 hour, 44 minutes per day) and one that you need to exercise a level of finesse with otherwise your campaign could fall flat.

Connect ensures that your carefully-crafted comms are used properly, creating a journey for the recipient based on their interactions with your venues, giving your campaign the best chance of success.

Rich customer profiles

With each interaction with your business, Connect builds a detailed profile of each of your customers, allowing it to better cater to their individual needs and preferences.

These preferences are based on factors such as lifecycle, recency, frequency and spend behaviour. It even takes into account their last visit, order value, anniversaries, birthdays—anything!

me&u integration with Lightspeed.

me&u directly integrates with your Lightspeed POS, making it easy to manage your menu, view your reports and sync transactional data straight into your CRM. 

With me&u’s Order & Pay, your front of house team is freed up from the process of manually taking and processing orders, rather, orders are sent straight through to wherever they need to go (the kitchen or bar), speeding up service by removing any unnecessary steps.

Your front of house team spends less time on the ordering process and more time creating better customer experiences.

And once a dining experience is complete, that customer’s data is captured to provide even better service the next time they call in.

Everybody wins.